Tag: Podcasts

Episode 205 – Google’s Camille Stewart: InfoSec’s Lack of Diversity is a Cyber Risk

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Here’s the deal with the information security industry in the United States: our country doesn’t have nearly the number of information security professionals that it needs. According to an estimate from Cybersecurity Ventures, the shortage of US cyber security workers could reach 500,000 people in 2021. The other point worth noting is that the information security professionals we do have are overwhelmingly white and male.  ISC2 data show that just 24% of cybersecurity workers are women. Just 9% of workers self-identified as African American or Black, compared with 13%of the population at large. Just 4% identified as Hispanic, compared with 18% of the overall population. 

Camille Stewart is the Head of Security Policy for Google Play and Android at Google.
Camille Stewart is the Head of Security Policy for Google Play and Android at Google

We know that the shortage of infosec pros poses a cybersecurity risk. Companies across industries struggle to find and then retain information security professionals to staff security operations centers (SOCs) and manage the security of networks in sectors like government, healthcare and retail. 

Episode 148: Joseph Menn on Cult of the Dead Cow also Veracode CEO Sam King on InfoSec’s Leaky Talent Pipeline

But what about the lack of diversity? Do infosec’s racial and gender imbalances create their own kind of security risks? Does a homogenous population of security pros potentially blind the organizations they work for  – and our society – to cyber risks? Does it shut off exploration of potentially beneficial programs, solutions or avenues of inquiry that might help solve the epidemic of cyber security threats and attacks plaguing our society? 

You and your teams are not as effective and as able to address the threat without a diverse lens. 

Camille Stewart, Google

Episode 85: Supply Chain Attacks and Hacking Diversity with Leon Johnson

According to our guest this week: it just might. Camille Stewart is the Head of Security Policy for Google Play and Android at Google. She is also a Cyber Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Camille is the author of the essay “Systemic Racism is a Cybersecurity Threat” which ran on the Council of Foreign Relations website back in June of 2020.

In it, Camille argues that understanding how systemic racism influences cyber security is integral to protecting the American people and defending the country from cyber adversaries. 

In this conversation, Camille and I talk about her own journey to information security as a black woman and about the barriers that men and women of color face as they seek to enter information security.

We also discuss her theory on how the information security industry’s struggles to diversify might increase cyber security risks. Camille notes that the country’s history of systemic racism and the different lived experiences of black and white Americans bears on everything from the effectiveness of public information campaigns to hiring and recruiting within the field, to the U.S.’s efforts to foster international agreement on cybersecurity norms.

“We do a disservice to ourselves as practitioners to ignore race and gender,” Camille told me. “They are a direct impediment to the work we’re doing.”

Episode 204: Josh Corman of CISA on securing the Vaccine Supply Chain

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In this episode of the podcast (#204) we’re joined by Josh Corman of CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to talk about how that agency is working to secure the healthcare sector, in particular vaccine supply chains that have come under attack by nations like Russia, China and North Korea.

Incidents like the Solar Winds hack have focused our attention on the threat posed by nation states like Russia and China, as they look to steal sensitive government and private sector secrets. But in the vital healthcare sector, nation state actors are just one among many threats to the safety and security of networks, data, employees and patients.

Joshua Corman is the Chief Strategist for Healthcare and COVID on the CISA COVID Task Force.
Joshua Corman is the Chief Strategist for Healthcare and COVID on the CISA COVID Task Force.

In recent years, China has made a habit of targeting large health insurers and healthcare providers as it seeks to build what some have described as a “data lake” of U.S. residents that it can mine for intelligence. Criminal ransomware groups have released their malicious wares on the networks of hospitals, crippling their ability to deliver vital services to patients and – more recently – nation state actors like North Korea, China and Russia have gone phishing – with a “ph” – for information on cutting edge vaccine research related to COVID 19.

How is the U.S. government responding to this array of threats? In this episode of the podcast, we’re bringing you an exclusive interview with Josh Corman, the Chief Strategist for Healthcare and COVID for the COVID Task Force at CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Cryptocurrency Exchanges, Students Targets of North Korea Hackers

In this interview, Josh and I talk about the scramble within CISA to secure a global vaccine supply chain in the midst of a global pandemic. Among other things, Josh talks about the work CISA has done in the last year to identify and shore up the cyber security of vital vaccine supply chain partners – from small biotech firms that produce discrete but vital components needed to produce vaccines to dry ice manufacturers whose product is needed to transport and store vaccines.

Episode 194: What Happened To All The Election Hacks?

To start off I asked Josh to talk about CISA’s unique role in securing vaccines and how the Federal Government’s newest agency works with other stake holders from the FBI to the FDA to address widespread cyber threats.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 203: Don’t Hack The Water and Black Girls Hack Founder Tennisha Martin

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In this episode of the Security Ledger Podcast (#203) we talk about the apparent hack of a water treatment plant in Oldsmar Florida with Frank Downs of the firm BlueVoyant. In our second segment: is infosec’s lack of diversity a bug or a feature? Tennisha Martin of Black Girls Hack joins us to talk about the many obstacles that black women face as they try to enter the information security field.

Part 1: Don’t Hack the Water!

An obscure water treatment facility in Oldsmar Florida became ground zero for the United States concerns about foreign adversaries ability to access and control critical infrastructure last week, after local officials revealed in a news conference that an unknown assailant had remotely accessed the facility’s SCADA system and attempted to raise levels of the poisonous chemical sodium hydroxide in the drinking water by a factor of more than 100. 

Frank Downs is the Director of Proactive Services at Bluevoyant.

The attack failed after a worker at the treatment plant saw it play out on his terminal in real time, and adjusted the sodium hydroxide levels back to normal. Nor would it have worked, officials assured a worried public: sensors elsewhere in the water distribution system would almost certainly have caught the abrupt increase in the dangerous chemical. 

But closies do count when it comes to critical infrastructure hacks, and the Oldsmar incident set off a federal investigations and a flurry of warnings and editorial hand-wringing about the risks facing critical infrastructure systems. That’s especially true with so many workers accessing them remotely during the pandemic, leaving sensitive systems exposed. 

Episode 202: The Byte Stops Here – Biden’s Cyber Agenda

In our first segment this week, Frank Downs of the firm BlueVoyant joins us in the Security Ledger studio to discuss the water system hack and why critical infrastructure firms continue to struggle to protect their environments. 

Can Infosec Walk the Talk on Diversity?

For years professionals have decried the lack of diversity in the information security field which, even more than high tech in general, is dominated by white men. At infosec conferences, concerted effort has been made giving more visibility and voice to women and minorities. The dreaded “MANels” – panels made up entirely of men – have been targeted and, in many cases, banished. But down in the trenches – where information hiring takes place and information work is done – there is little evidence of change. 

Tennisha Martin Black Girls Hack
Tennisha Martin is the Executive Director of Black Girls Hack.

The lack of progress, despite a crushing shortage of infosec workers and the stated intentions of infosec leaders and executives, might get you wondering whether cyber’s lack of diversity is a bug or a feature of the system. 

Episode 200: Sakura Samurai Wants To Make Hacking Groups Cool Again. And: Automating Our Way Out of PKI Chaos

Our next guest suggests that it may be a feature indeed. Tennisha Martin is the founder of Black Girls Hack, a group that looks to promote women of color in cyber security. In this conversation, Tennisha and I talk about the many large and small obstacles that keep women like herself from pursuing cyber security careers: from inequalities in K-12 education to pricey certifications and acronym-stuffed job requirements. Solving those problems, Tennisha says, is going to take more than kind words and promises from Infosec leaders. 

Tenniesha Martin is the founder of Black Girls Hack, a non profit organization that promotes women of color in the information security field. 

Episode 202: The Byte Stops Here – Biden’s Cyber Agenda

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In this episode of the Security Ledger Podcast (#202) we do a deep dive on President Biden’s cyber agenda with three experts on federal cyber policy and the challenges facing the new administration.

Well, it almost didn’t happen, but on January 20, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. More than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, Biden inherited a country in the throws of a crisis. By the time of his inauguration, the COVID virus had killed upwards of 400,000 U.S. residents and tanked the  national economy. As the incidents of January 6 indicated, right wing militant groups are stirring and threatening to topple democratic institutions.

Enter Solar Storm

And, as if that wasn’t enough, the weeks between the November Election and Biden’s January inauguration brought to light evidence of what is perhaps the biggest cyber intrusion by a foreign adversary into US government networks, the so called Solar Storm hack, which has been widely attributed to the government of Russia. 

Even before Solar Storm, Biden made clear as a candidate that a cyber security reset was needed and that cyber would be a top priority of his administration. The wide ranging hack of the US Treasury, Departments, of State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security – among others – just added fuel to the roaring dumpster fire of Federal IT security. 

But what will that reset look like? To understand a bit better what might be in store in the months ahead we devoted this episode of the podcast to interviewing three experts on federal IT security and cyber defense. 

Rebuilding Blocks

But first, before you can do a reset you need to understand what went wrong the first time around. In the case of federal cyber security, that’s not a short list.

Spotlight Podcast: Taking a Risk-Based Approach to Election Security

In our fist segment, we’re joined by two experts on cyber policy about the US governments struggles to get cyber security right, culminating with the problems seen during the Trump administration.

Lauren Zabierek is the Executive Director of Cyber Project at Belfer Center For Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She’s joined by Paul Kolbe, the Director of the Intelligence Project at Belfer Center. The two joined me in the Security Ledger studios to talk about how the Biden Administration might rebuild the US government’s cyber function and who might populate key positions in the new administration. 

Spotlight Podcast: QOMPLX CISO Andy Jaquith on COVID, Ransomware and Resilience

To start off, I asked them what the biggest challenges are out of the gate for the new administration. 

The Byte Stops Here: What Cyber Leadership Looks Like

As Harry Truman famously said: the “Buck stops” at the President’s desk. That wasn’t a phrase that was heard much during the Trump years. But with a new President sworn in, what does real leadership look like on federal cyber security?

Mark Weatherford is the Chief Strategy Officer at the National Cyber Security Center.

To find out, we invited Mark Weatherford into the studio to talk. Mark is the Chief Strategy Officer at the national cyber security center. a former CISO for the State of California and Deputy Under Secretary for Cyber Security at the DHS. In this conversation, Mark and I talk about the importance of presidential leadership on cyber security and what – if anything – the Trump administration got right on cyber policy in its four years in power. 

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 201: Bug Hunting with Sick Codes

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In the past 20 years, bug hunting has transformed from a hobby (or maybe even a felony) to a full-time profession for tens of thousands of talented software engineers around the globe. Thanks to the growth in private and public bug bounty programs, men and women with the talent can earn a good living by sniffing out flaws in the code for applications and – increasingly -physical devices that power the 21st century global economy. 

Asus ShadowHammer suggests Supply Chain Hacks are the New Normal

Bug Hunting Smart TVs To Supply Chain

What does that work look like and what platforms and technologies are drawing the attention of cutting edge vulnerability researchers? To find out we sat down with the independent researcher known as Sick Codes (@sickcodes). In recent months, he has gotten attention for a string of important discoveries. Among other things, he discovered flaws in Android smart television sets manufactured by the Chinese firm TCL and was part of the team, along with last week’s guest John Jackson, that worked to fix a serious server side request forgery flaw in a popular open source security module, NPM Private IP. 

Spotlight Podcast: How Machine Learning is revolutionizing Application Fuzzing

In this interview, Sick Codes and I talk about his path to becoming a vulnerability researcher, the paid and unpaid research he conducts looking for software flaws in common software and internet of things devices, some of the challenges and impediments that still exist in reporting vulnerabilities to corporations and what’s in the pipeline for 2021. 

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 200: Sakura Samurai Wants To Make Hacking Groups Cool Again. And: Automating Our Way Out of PKI Chaos

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In this episode of the podcast (#200), sponsored by Digicert: John Jackson, founder of the group Sakura Samurai talks to us about his quest to make hacking groups cool again. Also: we talk with Avesta Hojjati of the firm Digicert about the challenge of managing a growing population of digital certificates and how  automation may be an answer.

Life for independent security researchers has changed a lot in the last 30 years. The modern information security industry grew out of pioneering work by groups like Boston-based L0pht Heavy Industries and the Cult of the Dead Cow, which began in Lubbock, Texas.

After operating for years in the shadows of the software industry and in legal limbo, by the turn of the millennium hackers were coming out of the shadows. And by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they were free to pursue full fledged careers as bug hunters, with some earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through bug bounty programs that have proliferated in the last decade.

Despite that, a stigma still hangs over “hacking” in the mind of the public, law enforcement and policy makers. And, despite the growth of bug bounty programs, red teaming and other “hacking for hire” activities, plenty of blurry lines still separate legal security research from illegal hacking. 

Hacks Both Daring…and Legal

Still, the need for innovative and ethical security work in the public interest has never been greater. The Solar Winds hack exposed the ways in which even sophisticated firms like Microsoft and Google are vulnerable to compromised software supply chain attacks. Consider also the tsunami of “smart” Internet connected devices like cameras, television sets and appliances are working their way into homes and workplaces by the millions. 

Podcast Episode 112: what it takes to be a top bug hunter

John Jackson is the co -founder of Sakura Samurai, an independent security research group. 

What does a 21st century hacking crew look like? Our first guest this week is trying to find out. John Jackson (@johnjhacking) is an independent security researcher and the co-founder of a new hacking group, Sakura Samurai, which includes a diverse array of security pros ranging from a 15 year old Australian teen to Aubrey Cottle, aka @kirtaner, the founder of the group Anonymous. Their goal: to energize the world of ethical hacking with daring and attention getting discoveries that stay on the right side of the double yellow line.

Update: DHS Looking Into Cyber Risk from TCL Smart TVs

In this interview, John and I talk about his recent research including vulnerabilities he helped discover in smart television sets by the Chinese firm TCL, the open source security module Private IP and the United Nations. 

Can PKI Automation Head Off Chaos?

One of the lesser reported sub plots in the recent Solar Winds hack is the use of stolen or compromised digital certificates to facilitate compromises of victim networks and accounts. Stolen certificates played a part in the recent hack of Mimecast, as well as in an attack on employees of a prominent think tank, according to reporting by Reuters and others. 

Avesta Hojjati is the head of Research & Development at Digicert.

How is it that compromised digital certificates are falling into the hands of nation state actors? One reason may be that companies are managing more digital certificates than ever, but using old systems and processes to do so. The result: it is becoming easier and easier for expired or compromised certificates to fly under the radar. 

Our final guest this week, Avesta Hojjati, the  Head of R&D at DigiCert, Inc. thinks we’ve only seen the beginning of this problem. As more and more connected “things” begin to populate our homes and workplaces, certificate management is going to become a critical task – one that few consumers are prepared to handle.

Episode 175: Campaign Security lags. Also: securing Digital Identities in the age of the DeepFake

What’s the solution? Hojjati thinks more and better use of automation is a good place to start. In this conversation, Avesta and I talk about how digital transformation and the growth of the Internet of Things are raising the stakes for proper certificate management and why companies need to be thinking hard about how to scale their current certificate management processes to meet the challenges of the next decade. 

(*) Disclosure: This podcast was sponsored by Digicert. For more information on how Security Ledger works with its sponsors and sponsored content on Security Ledger, check out our About Security Ledger page on sponsorships and sponsor relations.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 199 COVID’s Other Legacy: Data Theft and Enterprise Insecurity

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In this episode of the podcast (#199), sponsored by LastPass, we’re joined by Barry McMahon, a Senior Global Product Marketing Manager at LogMeIn, to talk about data from that company that weighs the security impact of poor password policies and what a “passwordless” future might look like. In our first segment, we speak with Sareth Ben of Securonix about how massive layoffs that have resulted from the COVID pandemic put organizations at far greater risk of data theft.

The COVID Pandemic has done more than scramble our daily routines, school schedules and family vacations. It has also scrambled the security programs of organizations large and small, first by shifting work from corporate offices to thousands or tens of thousands of home offices, and then by transforming the workforce itself through layoffs and furloughs.

In this episode of the podcast, we did deep COVID’s lesser discussed legacy of enterprise insecurity.

Layoffs and Lost Data

We’ve read a lot about the cyber risks of Zoom (see our interview with Patrick Wardle) or remote offices. But one of the less-mentioned cyber risks engendered by COVID are the mass layoffs that have hit companies in sectors like retail, travel and hospitality, where business models have been upended by the pandemic. The Department of Labor said on Friday that employers eliminated 140,000 jobs in December alone. Since February 2020, employment in leisure and hospitality is down by some 3.9 million jobs, the Department estimates. If data compiled by our next guest is to be believed, many of those departing workers took company data and intellectual property out the door with them. 

Shareth Ben is the executive director of field engineering at Securonix. That company has assembled a report on insider threats that found that most employees take some data with them. Some of that is inadvertent – but much of it is not.

While data loss detection has long been a “thing” in the technology industry, Ben notes that evolving technologies like machine learning and AI are making it easier to spot patterns of behavior that correlate with data theft- for example: spotting employees who are preparing to leave a company and take sensitive information with them. In this discussion, Shareth and I talk about the Securonix study on data theft, how common the problem is and how COVID and the layoffs stemming from the pandemic have exacerbated the insider data theft problem. 

It’s Not The Passwords…But How We Use Them

Nobody likes passwords but getting rid of them is harder than it seems. Even in 2021, User names and passwords are part and parcel of establishing access to online services – cloud based or otherwise. But all those passwords pose major challenges for enterprise security. Data from LastPass suggest that the average organization IT department spends up to 5 person hours a week just to assist with password problems of users – almost a full day of work. 

Barry McMahon a senior global product marketing manager at LastPass and LogMeIn. McMahon says that, despite talk of a “password less” future, traditional passwords aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean that the current password regime of re-used passwords and sticky notes can’t be improved drastically – including by leveraging some of the advanced security features of smart phones and other consumer electronics. Passwords aren’t the problem, so much as how we’re using them, he said. 

To start off, I ask Barry about some of the research LastPass has conducted on the password problem in enterprises. Barry McMahon a senior global product marketing manager at LastPass and LogMeIn.

(*) Disclosure: This podcast was sponsored by LastPass, a LogMeIn brand. For more information on how Security Ledger works with its sponsors and sponsored content on Security Ledger, check out our About Security Ledger page on sponsorships and sponsor relations.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted.

Episode 198: Must Hear Interviews from 2020

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Let’s face it, 2020 was a terrible year. The Coronavirus has killed almost two million people globally and caused trillions of dollars in economic disruption. Wildfires, floods and hurricanes have ravaged the United States, central America, Australia and parts of Asia.

But trying times have a way of peeling back the curtains and seeing our world with new eyes. COVID messed up our lives, and focused our attention on what really matters.

Maybe that’s why this very bad year has led to some really good conversations and insights here on The Security Ledger on topics ranging from election security, to security supply chains and the security risks of machine learning.

  • Patrick Wardle
    Patrick Wardle is a principal security researcher at the firm Jamf.
  • Trammel Hudson
    Trammel Hudson is the founder of project Airbreak and of Lower Layer Labs.
  • Gary McGraw
    Gary McGraw is the co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning.
  • Assaf Harel
    Assaf Harel is the Chief Scientist at Karamba Security.
2020 yielded a crop of great interviews for our podcast.

The Security Risks of Machine Learning

To start off, I pulled a March interview from Episode 180 that i did with security luminary Gary McGraw, the noted entrepreneur, author and now co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning.

To wrap up 2020, I went back through 35 episodes that aired this year and selected four interviews that stuck out and, in my mind, captured the 2020 zeitgeist, as we delved into issues as diverse as the security implications of machine learning to the cyber threats to election systems and connected vehicles. We’re excerpting those conversations now in a special end of year edition of the podcast. We hope you enjoy it.

Taking Hardware Off Label to Save Lives

As winter turned to spring this year, the COVID virus morphed from something happening “over there” to a force that was upending life here at home. As ICUs in places like New York City rapidly filled, the U.S. faced shortage of respirators for critically ill patients. As they often do: the hacking community rose to the challenge. In our second segment, I pulled an interview from Episode 182 with Trammell Hudson of Lower Layer Labs. In this conversation, Trammell talks to us about Project Airbreak, his work to jailbreak a CPAP machines and how an NSA hacking tool helped make this inexpensive equipment usable as a makeshift respirator.

Report: Hacking Risk for Connected Vehicles Shows Significant Decline

COVID Spotlights Zoom’s Security Woes

One of the big cyber security themes of 2020 was of the security implications of changes forced by the COVID virus. Chief among them: the rapid shift to remote work and the embrace of technologies, such as Zoom that enabled remote work and remote meetings. For our third segment, I returned to Episode 183 and my interview with security researcher Patrick Wardle, a Principle Security Researcher at the firm JAMF. In April, he made headlines for disclosing a zero day vulnerability in the Zoom client – one that could have been used by an attacker to escalate their privileges on a compromised machines. That earned him a conversation with Zoom’s CEO that took place – to Wardle’s dismay – via Zoom.

Securing Connected Vehicles

Finally, while COVID and the ripple effects of the pandemic dominated the news in 2020, it isn’t as it was the only news. In the shadows of the pandemic, other critical issues continued to bubble. One of them is the increasing tensions about the power held by large companies and technology firms. In our final segment, I’m returning to my conversation with Assaf Harel of Karamba Security in Episode 193. Harel is one of the world’s top experts in the security of connected vehicles. In this conversation, Assaf and I talk about the state of vehicle cyber security: what the biggest cyber risks are to connected cars. We also go deep on the right to repair -and how industries like automobiles can balance consumer rights with security and privacy concerns.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 197: The Russia Hack Is A 5 Alarm Fire | Also: Shoppers Beware!

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In this episode of the podcast (#197), sponsored by LastPass, former U.S. CISO General Greg Touhill joins us to talk about news of a vast hack of U.S. government networks, purportedly by actors affiliated with Russia. In our second segment, with online crime and fraud surging, Katie Petrillo of LastPass joins us to talk about how holiday shoppers can protect themselves – and their data – from cyber criminals.

Every day this week has brought new revelations about the hack of U.S. Government networks by sophisticated cyber adversaries believed to be working for the Government of Russia. And each revelation, it seems, is worse than the one before – about a purported compromise of US government networks by Russian government hackers. As of Thursday, the U.S. Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA was dispensing with niceties, warning that it had determined that the Russian hackers “poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations”

The incident recalls another from the not-distant past: the devastating compromise of the Government’s Office of Personnel Management in 2014- an attack attributed to adversaries from China that exposed the government’s personnel records – some of its most sensitive data – to a foreign power. 

Do Cities deserve Federal Disaster Aid after Cyber Attacks?

Now this attack, which is so big it is hard to know what to call it. Unlike the 2014 incident it isn’t limited to a single federal agency. In fact, it isn’t even limited to the federal government: state, local and tribal governments have likely been affected, in addition to hundreds or thousands of private firms including Microsoft, which acknowledged Thursday that it had found instances of the software compromised by the Russians, the SolarWinds Orion product, in its environment. 

Former Brigadier General Greg Touhill is the President of Federal Group at the firm AppGate.

How did we get it so wrong? According to our guest this week, the failures were everywhere. Calls for change following OPM fell on deaf ears in Congress. But the government also failed to properly assess new risks – such as software supply chain attacks – as it deployed new applications and computing models. 

U.S. sanctions Russian companies, individuals over cyber attacks

Greg Touhill, is the President of the Federal Group of secure infrastructure company AppGate. he currently serves as a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. In a prior life, Greg was a Brigadier General Greg Touhill and  the first Federal Chief Information Security Officer of the United States government. 

U.S. Customs Data Breach Is Latest 3rd-Party Risk, Privacy Disaster

In this conversation, General Touhill and I talk about the hack of the US government that has come to light, which he calls a “five alarm fire.” We also discuss the failures of policy and practice that led up to it and what the government can do to set itself on a new path. The federal government has suffered “paralysis through analysis” as it wrestled with the need to change its approach to security from outdated notions of a “hardened perimeter” and keeping adversaries out. “We’ve got to change our approach,” Touhill said.

The malls may be mostly empty this holiday season, but the Amazon trucks come and go with a shocking regularity. In pandemic plagued America, e-commerce has quickly supplanted brick and mortar stores as the go-to for consumers wary of catching a potentially fatal virus. 

(*) Disclosure: This podcast was sponsored by LastPass, a LogMeIn brand. For more information on how Security Ledger works with its sponsors and sponsored content on Security Ledger, check out our About Security Ledger page on sponsorships and sponsor relations.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Episode 196: Building the Case Against Sandworm with Cisco Talos

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The Department of Justice in October announced charges against six men believed to work for the Russian GRU and linked to some of the most sinister cyber attacks of the last decade including the NotPetya malware and attacks on the government of Ukraine. In this podcast we talk to two men who helped build the DOJ’s case: Cisco’s Matt Olney, the Director of Talos Threat Intelligence and Interdiction and Craig Williams, the Talos Director of Outreach about the case against the Russian actors and what companies can do to defend themselves.

The news this week was that FireEye, one of the U.S.’s most prominent cyber security firms, had itself become a victim of a cyber crime. The likely suspects: state-sponsored hackers working on behalf of the Government of Russia.

Now, according to reports, Russian hacking groups may have access to FireEye’s custom “red team” tools for testing client’s defenses or identifying malicious activity. That’s a possible bounty for Russian state-sponsored crews like so-called “Cozy Bear,” or APT 29, which are already among the most feared cyber adversaries in the world.

But just because Russian hacking groups act often act with impunity doesn’t mean they’re invisible – or even unknowable. In fact, it was just a few weeks ago – on October 15 – that the U.S. Justice Department named six officers of Russia’s GRU in connection with a string of high profile hacks and cyber attacks including the NotPetya malware and attacks on the government of Ukraine and on the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic games.

The men were believed to be part of state-sponsored hacking groups with names like “Sandworm Team,” “Telebots,” “Voodoo Bear,” and “Iron Viking,” according to a statement by the DOJ.

How did the U.S. Justice Department follow the tracks from those amorphous attacks to six, Russian men? Our guests this week were among those working behind the scenes to make sense of those attacks and help understand what happened and who was behind them.

Talos had a front row seat in a number of the incidents mentioned in the Department of Justice report, including the NotPetya outbreak , the attacks on Ukraine and the campaign against the 2018 olympics. Craig and Matt joined me in the Security Ledger studio to talk about the DOJ announcement and what goes into the project of identifying and charging foreign hacking groups. We also talk about what it takes to stop and even catch a Russian APT group, and what companies can do to protect themselves from the world’s most elite offensive hackers.